Ants integrate proprioception as well as visual context and efference copies to make robust predictions

Description

Océane Dauzere-Peres and Antoine Wystrach show how ants predict what their own movement will look like, in a 2024 study. Animals use forward models: they copy their motor commands to cancel out the expected sensory result of moving. In flies, such copies adjust vision during flight. Whether walking ants use them, and how, was open.

The team mounted desert ants in a virtual reality rig and tampered with the link between steps and seen motion. The ants did compute predictions of expected visual flow from their movements. But the predictions drew on three sources at once: motor copies, body feedback from the legs, and the structure of the surrounding panorama. Each eye's mismatch between prediction and reality was measured separately. The combined error signal then retuned the ants' internal stepping rhythm. Prediction in these insects is a team effort across senses.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC11609268